design

I confess, I’ve been sucked into the Amazon Subscribe and Save program. I hate having to battle parking lots and fight the crowds at Target just to buy toilet paper and tissues. It’s so much easier to let the regular staples come to me once a month. I also do the same with miscellaneous other items – books, the odd tool. (Between Netflix and AppleTV, I’ve cut way back on Blu-rays, and 99% of my music purchases are mp3 downloads....

Time was, design was something of a blueprint. You drafted up the poster or magazine or brochure. You knew the materials that would go into it. You knew the printer’s color process. You knew the paper stock you’d be using. You knew the tolerances of the machinery involved. And you could design for it, accommodate and adapt to the limitations and contingencies, design for the essential result. This font in this point size in this color positioned right here on this stock cropped just so....

You theme with the mark-up you have, not the mark-up you’d like to have. That’s the essential truth that designers and front-end developers new to Drupal need to understand. You don’t get to construct your pages from scratch, building out essentials, never a wasted div, never an extraneous class. No, you have to flip the entire process around. With Drupal you’re getting markup shot at you from a firehose, and as a themer you need to sop it all up and make it pretty....

What job does your website do? Is it doing the job that you initially set out for it? With all the excitement happening online, all the buzz, all the enticing opportunities, and all the fabulous tools standing ready at hand, it can be tempting to just dive in to building a site — design it and launch! The barriers to entry seem so low — the how often seems to be in such easy reach — you just grab it and go, without ever considering the questions of what you want to launch....